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A POET FORGETS HIS LIBRARY by Cornelius Eady

Look at all those lovely books.
What are all those books to me?
Words are wriggle-fish in an endless sea.
I over-hear them talking,
Sometimes I think
They’re talking about me.

All this time, all this time
All this time at sea.
They say it has no memory.
A poet forgets his library.

Something was written long ago.
A voice I should know says it was written by me.
Something like a hymn, almost holy song,
Some face on the cover, but they’ve
Got it all wrong.
Tell me what this nonsense
Has to do with me?

All this time, all this time
All this time at sea.
They say it has no memory.
A poet forgets his library.

My name they say, is a man beloved,
A man with a printed history.
Here I sit, and here they try
To read it back to me.
What’s this accusation?
The hell is poetry?

All this time, all this time
All this time at sea.
They say it has no memory.
A poet forgets his library.

About Cornelius Eady

Poet/Playwright Cornelius Eady is the author of several poetry collections: Kartunes; Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the 1985 Lamont Prize; The Gathering of My Name, nominated for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; You Don't Miss Your Water; The Autobiography of a Jukebox; Brutal Imagination; and most recently, Hardheaded Weather (Putnam, 2008). A version of “A Poet Forgets His Library” will appear on Eady’s CD/chapbook Book of Hooks (Kattywompus Press), due to release in March of 2013. His awards include Fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Traveling Scholarship, and The Prairie Schooner Strousse Award. His work appears in many journals, magazines, and the anthologies Every Shut Eye Ain't Asleep, In Search of Color Everywhere, and The Vintage Anthology of African American Poetry, 1750-2000. He is co-founder of Cave Canem, and is currently The Miller Family Endowed Chair in Literature and Writing and Professor in English at The University of Missouri-Columbia.